


The In-Between Place

by starsandgraces



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Blood and Gore, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Medical Procedures, bangsian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:17:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandgraces/pseuds/starsandgraces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura may be dead, but that doesn't mean she's going to give up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I just like to think there's a way back for Laura, somehow. And a little pimp: if you like my fic and you like the AO3, consider [bidding on me](http://ao3auction.tumblr.com/starsandgraces) in the [AO3 auction](http://ao3auction.tumblr.com/)! It's for a good cause.

Laura wakes alone in a grey, shadowy world. She recognises Beacon Hills, but everything is unfocused and somehow wrong, as if it all shifted on its axis while she was asleep. The shadow clears a little, and Laura catches a glimpse of something pale and still, lying at her feet. And then she realises that maybe she wasn't asleep, and maybe this place _is_ wrong.

She's standing over her own body. Both halves of her body. It doesn't have the kind of emotional impact she thought it might.

"I'm dead," she says to herself. Her voice is strangely muffled—echoless—and it takes her a moment to realise that there's no sense of space here, in spite of what her eyes tell her. Laura drops to her knees and tries to touch her body's face, but her fingers slip right through.

That makes sense, in an odd sort of way. Her body is in the real Beacon Hills and she isn't.

***

She remembers slowly, the memories triggered by seeing things from the other world. The police searching for her body. An alpha attacking a boy and turning him. Derek burying her—the half of her the cops didn't find.

Peter is the alpha. Peter smiled, and killed her.

Derek doesn't know.

Laura screams herself hoarse trying to tell him, but he vanishes into the shadow and she doesn't see him again for what feels like a long, long time.

***

One day—not that she knows how long she's been here, or what a day really means in a world with no means of passing the time—Peter appears. Not the burned shell of Peter that she and Derek left in the hospital, but the Peter she remembers from before the fire.

"You killed me," Laura says, and hates how _petulant_ she sounds.

"Yes," he says. "And Derek killed me for it."

They sit in silence for a while. Laura doesn't know what she's supposed to say to him. She hunches her knees up against her chest and wraps her arms around them, holding herself together by sheer force of will. Peter is pack, or was pack before he went mad, but everything is different now, in this strange in-between place. He killed Laura and made her brother into a killer as well.

"I won't be here long," Peter says eventually. "It's not the company. I have other places to be."

"There's no way out," she says. "I've tried to find one, but it all turns back in on itself. You can walk forever and you'll just go in circles."

"There's a way out," he says, a smile creeping across his lips that Laura remembers all too well. "There's a girl."

***

It might be as long as weeks or it might only be hours before Peter's girl comes through for him. Laura follows him and watches him talk to her. If Peter knows she's there, he shows no sign of noticing—or caring.

The girl is named Lydia, and her red hair shines through the shadow world like a beacon. Laura doesn't know how she could have missed her before.

Lydia is immune to the bite. It's difficult for Laura to work out if Peter knew that before he bit her or if her immunity was coincidental. Laura knows better than most that Peter was far from sane before he died. Maybe he just got lucky.

She watches as Peter tightens his mental grip on Lydia. When she realises how far he intends to go in controlling her mind and her body, Laura tries to stop him.

For the first time since she woke up dead, she slips into the wolf. Peter's alpha form may be monstrous but they're evenly matched in here. Teeth and claws tear at flesh that won't bleed no matter what, and the fight lasts until they're both so exhausted neither can stand.

"I won't give up," Peter says, battered and human once more.

Laura looks as far into the shadow as she can, searching for Lydia. "Neither will I."

***

When Peter gets out, she doesn't see it happen. She just knows he's gone, even as she smells her brother's blood in the air.

***

The difficulty, it turns out, is being able to communicate with Lydia. Peter had a link to her in the scar he left on her body, but Laura has nothing except her determination to get out of this place and back to life.

She can't touch Lydia in a way that she'll notice, and Lydia doesn't seem to hear a word she says. Laura tries everything she can think of. There's either no way for her to get through, or Lydia's had enough of dead werewolves whispering in her ear and has resolved to ignore them.

Laura wouldn't blame her.

She talks to Lydia at every hour of the day, as much as she can when the time slips between the two worlds. She follows her around town and tries speaking to her in every different place she can, from the library to the used car lot. Nothing works.

Until one day, Lydia goes to the forest.

Laura thinks it's late afternoon. The shadows obscure it, but she can imagine the sun low in the sky, shining through the trees. She says, "Lydia, please," the same way she's said it a thousand times before.

Later, Laura wonders if they were near the place where she died. Maybe it was just sheer dumb luck. But this time Lydia turns, her hazel eyes widening. Focusing. On _Laura_.

"You—where did you come from?"

"Please," Laura says again, her voice breaking with relief. "Please, I need your help."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was asked to continue this when I posted the first part, and this week's prompt at [fullmoon-ficlet](http://fullmoon-ficlet.livejournal.com/) (This Will Hurt) really called to me to do so. This is _super_ handwavey, science-wise.

"The trouble is," Lydia says, "you don't have a body any more. Well. You don't have a usable body. I don't think you want me to cram you back into two decomposing halves."

It's one of the rare days when Lydia can see Laura through the shadowy haze, so Laura takes advantage of it and shoots a flat glare in her direction. "What else do you suggest?" she asks. "Putting me in some other dead girl's body?" Saying it aloud, even sarcastically, sends a shudder of visceral disgust through Laura. If that's her only option, she'd rather stay dead.

"I considered it," she replies lightly. Then, "Oh my god, Laura, _please_ stop looking at me like that. It's a bad idea and Doctor Deaton agrees. He thinks there's a way to trigger the healing before we try to bring you back, but it's not going to be easy. And..." Lydia trails off, suddenly hesitant.

"And what, Lydia?"

"And we'd need your brother's help."

***

The only way to persuade Derek that Lydia is really acting on Laura's behalf takes the recitation of a story Laura swore she'd take to her grave. And since she _did_ , she figures it isn't really breaking the promise to tell it now.

Derek sets his mouth into a thin line when she finishes talking, not meeting Lydia's eye. "What do I need to do?"

He donates blood three times a week for four weeks before Alan Deaton is satisfied with the amount. It's a lot even for a werewolf, and Laura watches her little brother growing more pale and tired with each passing week.

He never complains.

***

Laura's body looks far worse than the last time she saw it. It's been buried and dug up and autopsied, languishing in a morgue refrigerator for who knows how long before finally being stapled back together and buried again in a small, cheap plot.

She assumes Alan and Derek were the ones to dig her up this time, but she doesn't ask Lydia for the details.

Werewolf bodies decompose more slowly than human ones, but even so—it's not a pretty sight, what's left of Laura. She wouldn't blame Lydia if she didn't want to stay in the room with it, but Lydia has steel in her. She grits her teeth and assists Alan in sliding the large bore IV lines into place: in the body's wrists, its thighs, and directly into the heart.

A transfusion of alpha blood is the only chance they have of reversing the damage, and even that's no guarantee.

"Are you ready?" Alan asks Lydia.

"I am. But..." She looks at Laura for reassurance.

"I can't wait another month," Laura says, wanting to grab her by the arms and beg. She knows she can touch Lydia, because she saw Peter do it. And because she saw Peter do it, she doesn't. "And I don't think my body can either. Please, Lydia, it has to be tonight."

Lydia relays that to Alan. He turns to face the same area of the room that Lydia had, and for the briefest moment his eyes make contact with Laura's. Even though she knows he can't see her, in that fraction of a second, his eyes focus on her and her alone.

"I'm going to try my very best for you, Laura," he says calmly.

Derek doesn't say anything. He hasn't once tried to talk to her since he found out she was still around in her strange, parallel Beacon Hills.

***

Laura doesn't feel anything as the blood flows into her body. Of course, she's not using it yet, and so she can watch her body _unrot_ with a detached fascination. It begins slowly: her missing fingernails grow back incrementally and her skin gradually pinkens as blood fills the veins beneath it.

The wound that bisected her heals even more slowly. At first the blood leaks out from it, dripping from the edge of the table and onto the floor. It smells of Laura and Derek, mixed together in a way that's deeper than she's ever known before, and that's when Laura realises—she can _smell it_. It's the first time since she died.

Eventually the skin knits together and the metal staples pop out one by one as the body heals under them. Laura can't look away.

She's still transfixed when Alan says, "That's enough," and the three of them pull the IV lines from the body.

It's Lydia's turn, now, and they've never discussed this part. Laura doesn't know what Lydia will do to pull her consciousness out of the in-between place. Honestly, she's not sure Lydia knows either. She never talks about the night she raised Peter from the dead.

Lydia says, "I'm sorry. Laura, I'm so sorry."

The light of the full moon shines onto Laura's face and the pain rips through her like she's being pulled in a million directions at once. The scream that bursts from her comes out of the body as well. She's vaguely aware of Lydia clamping both hands over her ears.

The grey world won't relinquish its hold on her easily, and Laura's only consolation is that Peter felt this pain too. The thought strengthens her and she screams again—this time in defiance—tearing through the shadows with her claws, towards her body. Towards life. Into the pain and suffering that she's been numb to for these long months.

Dying doesn't hurt as much as living.

***

The room whites out.

Laura blacks out.

***

The first thing she's aware of is _cold_. Metal presses against the bare skin of her back and it makes her shiver. Laura opens her eyes and then closes them again immediately, because the light is so bright it hurts, leaving an afterimage burnt onto the inside of her eyelids.

She tries to speak, but her throat is raw. Someone helps her sit up and then presses something into her hands—round and plastic, filled with liquid.

"Drink," says a soothing voice. "It's water with a painkiller dissolved in it. It'll help your throat."

Laura drinks. It's disgusting but she manages to get it all down, and she immediately starts to feel better. "Alan?" she asks, squinting against the light.

"Remarkably, she doesn't seem to be brain-damaged," he says to someone else in the room. "Though knowing my name isn't a definitive test by medical standards, I'm optimistic."

"Laura?"

"Dee?"

She doesn't need her eyes to find Derek. She never has. Heedless of her nudity, Laura throws herself at him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing her face against the side of his neck. He's shaking and his grip on her is so tight that it hurts. Laura relishes the pain, because it means—

"I'm back," she says in wonder. After a moment, she realises there's someone else: the someone who led her home. "Lydia?"

"My hug can wait until you take a shower and put on some panties," Lydia says tartly, but she reaches out for Laura's hand and squeezes it almost as tightly as Derek.


End file.
